ASIM issue 55 Read online

  Editorial

  …Jacob Edwards

  Putting the Band Back Together

  (Note: in The Blues Brothers when Elwood announces, “It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a packet of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses,” and Jake declares, “Hit it,” the journey in question must be terribly convoluted—it takes half the night and a good part of the morning before they arrive. So, too, does this editorial wend its way but circuitously to the point. Unnecessary loquaciousness has been approved.)

  Released from prison one smog-stacked morning in 1980, ‘Joliet’ Jake Blues finds that the world has rolled on without him. Fashions have changed in the three years he’s been inside. Zoot suits and John Lee Hooker styled hats and dark glasses have gone out of style, replaced by blue jeans and the jumpsuits of Wayne Cochran and C.C. Riders. The classic live music venues at which his band used to play have been turned into discothèques. The Illinois of his youth—Robert Johnson’s Sweet Home Chicago—is no longer the downtown haven made famous by the soul, blues and rhythm + blues musicians of old. Jake and his brother Elwood have kept faith in the black suits and sunglasses of their upbringing but the rest of the Blues Brothers Band have moved with the times. Jake finds himself outdated and adrift, released from the state penitentiary as if from a time capsule.

  Epitomising this societal challenge to Jake’s self-identity, the Calumet City orphanage where he and Elwood were raised is to be sold unless they can pay a $5000 tax assessment within eleven days. The mother superior—resented yet held in residual respect—will be sent to the missions in Africa. Curtis the janitor, who sang Elmore James tunes to the young brothers and played them the harmonica, will be cast out to live on the streets. Even Jake’s memories are to be afforded no space in this new world of the 1980s. Yet, his response to this crisis is not one of despair, but rather to turn to the one thing he holds true in life: the music. Jake sets out to put the band back together and in doing so places his trust in the power of the blues, not only to recapture the life he knew before prison but also to check society’s unwanted progress and so make the world around him live, breathe and jump again.

  The solace that Jake finds when fronting the Blues Brothers Band is the same comfort that generations of speculative fiction writers have felt ever since the likes of Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker first set pen to paper. By stirring the clotted lifeblood of imagination, by capturing not only the technical aspects but also the emotive essence of an idea a writer, like a musician, can take the terror of an uncertain future (or present) and ameliorate it through nostalgic love of an earlier, happier time. And the power that Jake seeks in performance is no mere escapism; rather, it is a fleetingly tangible capacity to both express and shape the human condition. Master craftsmen—either in music or literature—have the ability to conjure up this force and cast its inspiration onto their listeners and readers. The magic invoked by the rhythm section, the blues guitar and the whiskied soul of vocals is the same magic that drips from the prescient nibs of fantasy, science fiction and horror exponents the world over.

  Jake and Elwood promote the Blues Brothers as the consummate show band and review. When they come onstage to the up-tempo refrains of I Can’t Turn You Loose and unlock the symbolic briefcase full of blues, what they are pledging to the audience is their intention not merely to parrot but rather to rework and reinterpret the musical standards of the great soul, blues and rhythm + blues oeuvres. The maestros of the Blues Brothers Band transcend those works that first inspired them, and the best of today’s speculative fiction writers make just such a commitment to exemplify and advance their respective genres. When Andromeda Spaceways Car No. 55 crashes through letterboxes and mail servers it will not be to the soulless proliferation of alien cyborg holocaust invading metamorphosed orphaned supernatural telepathic undead wizards; instead, it will take such elements—or more accurately, those aspects of the human psyche through which historically they have resonated—and showcase them in a sublime twenty-first century review.

  My personal thanks go to layout warden Simon Petrie (‘One black suit jacket; one pair of black suit pants; one hat, black’), sub-editor Garth Edwards (‘Nonsense, my dear fellow; my brother and I have come to dine’), and of course to the writers, poets and artists whose speculative riffs and literary and artistic prowess have imbued ASIM #55 with such imaginative presence, one might hope, as to stay fixed in memory for many years to come (‘We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline’). And for those readers who are about to set off on this 170 page drive (106 by the imperial system), no matter where you’ve been these last three years or what’s happening in the world around you, think of yourselves now as having just kissed Carrie Fisher and thrown her down into the mud. Sunglasses on. Cigarettes on standby. Now, hit it.

  Jacob Edwards

  Editor, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine Issue 55

  Winter Solstice, 2012

  ANDROMEDA SPACEWAYS Inflight Magazine

  Issue 55 (Vol. 10, Issue 3)

  Fiction

  Mick's Suit (T A Robinson)

  Attack of the Killer Space Lizards, part one (Tom Holt)

  Angel Air (Jacob A Boyd)

  Attack of the Killer Space Lizards, part two (Tom Holt)

  The New House (Kate Rowe)

  Hammer Fall (John Birmingham)

  The Wrong Righters: Zero-G (Simon Messingham)

  Attack of the Killer Space Lizards, part three (Tom Holt)

  Cullsman #9 (Michael John Grist)

  Paint By Numbers (Dan Rabarts)

  Illuminated (K J Parker)

  Attack of the Killer Space Lizards, part four (Tom Holt)

  Soul Blossom (Lisa A Koosis)

  Eternal Flame (Stephen Gallagher)

  Ashfield (Agatha Christie)

  First They Came … (Deborah Kalin)

  Musical Interlude

  Bobby, You’re My Boy (Richard O’Brien)

  Poetry

  The Moon Is Leaving (Chris Hicks)

  And If … (David Knopfler)

  Features

  Editorial (Jacob Edwards)

  I Owe it to Auntie (Jacob Edwards)

  Lycanthropy Beholden: An Interview with Glen Duncan (Jacob Edwards)

  Last Words (The ASIM Hivemind)

  Contributor Biographies

  Acknowledgements

  Art

  ‘Car No 55’ (cover art), by Inna Basman

  ‘Thistle’ (illustration to ‘Angel Air’), by Gary McCluskey

  ‘R O’B’s Country Bunker’ (illustration to ‘Bobby, You’re My Boy’), by Inna Basman

  ‘The Giant’ (illustration to ‘Hammer Fall’), by Sam Blanch

  ‘Pulling Down the Sky to Make a Dress’ (illustration to ‘The Moon Is Leaving’), by Sam Blanch

  ‘The Soldier Tries to Destroy the Shaman Throughout History and Across the World’ (illustration to ‘Illuminated’), by Sam Blanch

  ‘Damson and Selilah’ (illustration to ‘And If …’), by Sam Blanch

  ‘Fog Skull’ (illustration to ‘Eternal Flame’), by Gary McCluskey

  Mick’s Suit

  …T A Robinson

  ASIM congratulates T A Robinson on his first publication.

  It is a pleasure for me to have a story out in the open. Strange, too, because of all the pieces I’ve completed this is the one I thought least likely to be published. I’m delighted that it’s on ASIM ’s wavelength, and thank the magazine for providing such an encouraging forum for new writers.

  My friend Mick got into this new scene recently. At first I didn’t know what to make of it, but now I think it’s okay. This is what happened.

  I met Mick in a bar three weeks ago, around ele
ven o’clock. He was looking pretty shady and wearing a dark suit.

  “Where did you get the suit?” I asked.

  “Toilets of a jazz club,” he said. “On the floor. There was some blood, but I took it home and washed it in the bath. Now it’s looking okay.”

  “Sure is,” I said, though I had reservations. That suit looked mean. It was the sort of suit you’d wear to do bad things in. Interrogations maybe, or blackmail, or firing people and then destroying a whole bunch of illegal files. It was a two-piece exercise in malevolence.

  Now, Mick likes to take his clothes off at least once during an evening out, to go and chat to people naked. Extreme conversation, he calls it. When this happened tonight, I was left alone with the suit. I heard it cough and so I decided to talk to it privately, one-on-one.

  “So,” I said. “You from around here?”

  “Fuck off,” said the suit.

  “Hey,” I said. “I was just—”

  “I know what you was just,” said the suit. “Just being nosy.”

  “Fine,” I said, but I felt like I’d been intimidated into silence. I looked around the bar for a while. Then I tried again.

  “Uh—nice place, right?” I said.

  “No,” said the suit. “It’s a cheap shitty hellhole. Your mate needs new bars and new friends. Lucky he found me. I’m going to take him travelling. Introduce him to some people.”

  “What people?” I said.

  “Oligarchs,” said the suit. “Maybe some politicians, too. CEOs of multinationals. People with connections.”

  “Mick doesn’t like those types of people,” I said.

  “Folks change,” said the suit.

  “Not Mick.”

  “Well, sometimes folks need a little persuasion.”

  “Persuasion?”

  “Other friends of mine. Mr Necktie. Mr Belt Buckle. Want to meet them?”

  “Uh, no,” I said. I realised I sounded nervous. “I’m not into fashion,” I added.

  “Big surprise there,” said the suit.

  By that stage the barman had gotten annoyed with Mick’s nakedness, and had threatened to call the cops. So Mick had to come and get dressed, and the suit stayed quiet after he returned. But I knew more than ever that the suit was trouble.

  Now, Mick doesn’t like advice—he says he has to work things out for himself—so I didn’t tell him about my conversation. But I got a call from him three days later.

  “Weirdest thing happened with the suit,” he said.

  “Trouble?”

  “Big trouble. I was out walking in the park, right? Asking people if they’d seen my snake.”

  “You lost Julian?”

  “No. It just helps clear the park. Anyway, I’m down by the lake and I realise this old guy is following me. Homeless-looking guy. At first I think he’s got me mistaken, because I hear him saying, I know you, I know you. And then he comes up and starts tugging my arm. I’m thinking, maybe do a runner but then I realise the homeless guy isn’t talking to me, he’s talking to the suit. Even weirder, the suit is replying.”

  “Talking suit, hey?” I said, unconvincingly.

  “Yeah,” said Mick, who doesn’t notice if people are unconvincing. “Fully talking. Must be special Italian wool or something. But I also feel this lurch, like the suit is trying to pull back from the homeless guy. And then they have this whole conversation.”

  “What about?”

  “Well, the homeless guy says, I know you. And this talking suit says, Fuck off, Ringo, you don’t know nothing. And the homeless guy says, You said those people were good people, you said they’d take me to the top. And the suit says, You knew the risks. And the homeless guy says, Mikhalov screwed me, he knew that insurance company was going under. And the suit says, I dealt the hand, Ringo, I didn’t play the cards. And the homeless guy says, You cost me everything, you bastard! And he starts ripping the suit all the way up one arm!”

  “Quite a scene,” I said.

  “Quite an attention-getting scene,” agreed Mick. “I’m not even meant to be within a kilometre of that park, on account of some extreme conversation a few months back. But now I’m thinking, what am I meant to do? I’ve got this maniac attacking a suit I’m wearing, which is screaming back at him and using my arm to try and throw punches. So I decide I’ve had it, and I take the suit off and throw it on the ground. It started squirming, trying to get away. But the homeless guy took out a bottle of meth, and poured it on the suit and set fire to it.”

  “What was the suit saying?” I asked.

  “It kind of gurgled and yelled. But after that I don’t know, because I figured it would be better for me to leave, since I wasn’t wearing any clothes. Again.”

  “Wise move,” I said. “So what now. New suit?”

  “No more suits,” said Mick.

  “No?”

  “No. Been trying other stuff.”

  “Okay.”

  “Skirts.”

  “Oh.” I paused. “On you, or other people?”

  “Me. Feels more natural, more me somehow. Dresses, too.”

  “Oh.”

  “You okay with that?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Different. But why not?”

  So that’s how Mick got into this new transvestite scene.

  He hangs out with a whole different crowd now. Shandii, Simone, Myra. A new bar: Painted Face. He took me there once, and it was all wigs and short skirts on boys. Like I said, at first I didn’t know what to make of it. But it’s cool, you know? They seem nice. Welcoming, generally supportive. According to Mick they can be a bit bitchy, but it’s nothing serious. Nothing like the nastiness of that suit, anyway.

  There was this one weird incident, though, last week. I was in a Laundromat waiting for some of Mick’s stuff to dry while Mick was getting his legs waxed. And when I took his clothes out of the dryer, this green scarf-cravat-thing started chatting me up. It’s like, Oh you have a nice collar-bone and Gosh, your shirt would go well with green, want to try me on? I’m like, Well, maybe, but I thought you were Mick’s cravat. And the cravat’s like, Sure, but it’s not serious and I couldn’t be tied to one neck. Then it gets all huffy. It says, Mick’s not into saints, you know, he likes them free and easy, that yellow feather boa of his has soaked up more neck-sweat than a Wimbledon towel. But by this stage I’m like, Whatever, maybe another time. And I went outside.

  I thought maybe I’d tell Mick about the cravat, but then I thought no. He doesn’t like advice, and I figure sooner or later he’ll work it all out for himself.

  Attack of the Killer Space Lizards

  A Serial in Four Parts

  …Tom Holt

  Part One

  “We have a problem,” the admiral said.

  The others looked at him, though he wasn’t exactly hard to see. The admiral glowed brightly in this light, hardly flickering at all. At his age (72,116 next equinox; 72,087 of those years spent in the service of the Imperial Fleet) the occasional flicker was to be expected, but Aquamarine 7097 was old school. Not in front of the junior officers, it sets a bad example.

  “We’d sort of gathered that,” said Burnt Umber 47. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have dragged us all out here in the middle of Sunspots. What’s going on? What have you people done now?”

  The various commodores, field marshals, space vice marshals and lesser military weren’t quite sure where to look. Clearly Burnt Umber was making some kind of a point about the relationship between the military and the civil authorities in a free society, but this was hardly the time or the place. Aquamarine, however, replied as if he hadn’t noticed the rudeness. “It’s none of our doing, I’m fairly sure of that. Naturally we considered the possibility of a hoax, but we’ve done every possible test we could think of on the—” He hesitated, struggling for words. “—the thing, and we’re as certain as we can be, it’s not from this world, almost definitely not from this solar system, and very probably not even from this galaxy.” He paused, and added mild
ly, “All due respect to the Chief Assistant Deputy Undersecretary, but if this doesn’t justify an extraordinary session of the Council, I’m not quite sure what does.”

  “This object,” murmured Archbishop Green 4009008. “I must confess, I’m desperately curious. Can we see it?”

  “Of course. That’s why we’re all here.”

  Aquamarine concentrated his light into a tightly focussed beam, shining on a button on the operations console. There was a faint shimmer effect, and the intermediate range freight teleport materialised a grey anodised Hazmat container on the pad in the centre of the room. Aquamarine shone brightly on the lock, and the lid fell open.

  “There it is,” he said. “It’s all right to get close, there’s no harmful radiation or biological contaminants. As far as we know,” he added, as Burnt Umber shifted to glow around it.

  “As far as you—?” she said.

  “Indeed. We can’t run tests for hazards we don’t know about. Still,” he added pleasantly, “you’re there now. What do you make of it?”

  Burnt Umber concentrated her rays on the object nestled inside a cavity scooped out of the box’s expanded-polygraphite lining. “What the hell,” she said, “is that?”

  “We think it’s a book,” Aquamarine said.

  “You’re kidding.” She turned up her brightness a little, until she reflected faintly in the slightly glossy surface of the object. It was solid; about twenty-one centimetres long, fifteen centimetres wide and a tad under ten millimetres thick. There was a synthetic 2-D artistic representation on the upward-facing surface, and— “Lettering?”

  Aquamarine flared gently in acknowledgement. “We believe so.”

  “I don’t suppose,” the archbishop murmured softly, “there’s any hope at all of deciphering it.”

  Aquamarine glowed a little brighter. “Actually,” he said, “we think we may have done just that.”

  Stunned silence, and Burnt Umber couldn’t prevent a tiny flicker of telltale heat, betraying her anger at such a triumph on the part of the military. “That’s impossible,” she said. “Something so alien—”